Following UN Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf’s appeal to G-20 leaders to discuss agricultural initiatives for alleviating the global food crisis while meeting in London this week, the Fairtrade Foundation has repeated that call and said a fresh approach to trade was greatly needed to address the issue.
The group called on the hosting UK Government to stop pushing developing countries to liberalize their economies and not to rush through a completion of the WTO Doha trade round, claiming a global trade agreement is not in the interests of the world’s poorest countries.
The Fairtrade Foundation warned that the combination effects of the current food and financial crises are having a ‘devastating’ impact on farmers in the third world and called on the G-20 leaders to install measures to ensure food supplies and refrain from moving forward with trade negotiations.
Barbara Crowther, the Fairtrade Foundation’s director of communications and policy, said:
“The current crisis poses many new threats to the livelihoods of the poorest people on the planet.
“But they also offer an unprecedented opportunity for world leaders to develop a fresh approach to the global trading system, prioritizing justice and equity, including social and environmental standards, and build new trade relationships, fit to deal with the current financial, food and climate crises we now face.
“A new approach to global trade must put poor people and the planet first, strengthening local and regional supply chains, and ensuring cooperation in fairer global trade at an international level.”
Posted by Sara Chupein
